


Wishes in Wartime

by gondalsqueen



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Adventure, F/M, Fluff, Heavy Conversations, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Past Character Death, Space family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 12:10:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14164560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen
Summary: “What about you, Hera Syndulla? What will you do when the galaxy’s at peace?”In which Kanan and Hera have a fun afternoon, an unfortunate speeder chase, and a heart-to-heart. And Hera is bad at predicting the future.The prompts were "Lasting Peace," "Saying Goodbye," and "Fear of Loss." I thought...why not all three?





	Wishes in Wartime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KianRai_Delcam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KianRai_Delcam/gifts).



CRACK. 

A hand came down hard on Hera’s head, crushing something on top of her cap. It didn’t take her two seconds to figure out what had happened. 

She shook her head with as much dignity as she could muster. Bits of eggshell and confetti and suspiciously sparkly stuff floated into her face and landed on her shirt. “Great.” She crossed her arms and turned to Kanan accusingly. “I’m going to be covered in glitter for a month.” 

“Promise?” he asked. 

She narrowed her eyes. “I owe you.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before.” 

The best part about making themselves inconspicuous in town until they could intercept today’s target was the Gareli Festival of Color. Booths lined the main street — clothing, toys, crafts, dubious meats roasted on sticks… 

...The worst part was the hollowed-out eggshell glitterbomb that Kanan had just cracked on her head, apparently a tradition at this time of year. And even that wasn’t really so bad. Sabine, of course, had promptly acquired three dozen of the things and begun pummelling Ezra. Two booths down, Ezra had finally gotten hold of one of her boxes and was launching a respectable counter-attack, the two of them getting vicious enough that passersby had to step carefully around them. Normally this kind of thing would attract way too much attention on a day when they were supposed to be “blending in,” but Ezra and Sabine looked so much like typical teenagers that Hera couldn’t see any harm in it.

Kanan, on the other hand… 

“Next time you want to crack one of those things on my head, we should probably have a discussion first,” Hera teased him. 

“Come on — ” he leaned into her, bumping her shoulder playfully with his own — “be a good sport.”

“Oh, I’m a good sport. I just read the fine print before purchasing the product.” Hera tapped a placard on the booth closest to them.  

Kanan read aloud: “‘Although today’s Festival of Color finds everyone, from grandparents to the smallest of children, smashing cualta eggs, the tradition originated as a spring fertility festival, in which couples trying to conceive would break the eggs — ’ Wheeew!” he said. 

“You have something you want to tell me?” she asked. 

“...Oops?” Kanan volunteered, and she took pity on him and burst out laughing. “Do you think Sabine and Ezra know?”

Someone down the street squealed in indignation — Hera was pretty sure it was Ezra. Sabine swept his legs out from under him and, when he fell, rubbed the remains of a crushed egg in his face. “I’m going to go with ‘no.’” 

“Pick up one of those informational pamphlets for me. I’ll leave it under her dinner plate.” 

Hera nabbed one. “How are we doing on time?” she asked. 

Kanan checked his chronometer. “A little more than an hour until they open the warehouse. You hungry?” 

“I could be persuaded.” 

“Hera! Kanan! Look at this!” The great battle of Main Street had broken off, and Sabine came over waving a flimsi-printed flyer at them. 

“Festival of Color Fun Run,” Kanan read. “2.5k. Race into spring. Circle the block and get sprayed by paint cannons as you go.” 

Sabine gave them a look of such comical pleading that Hera laughed. “All right, we can spare you on this one. Go ahead.” 

“You’re sure? We’re really here for the mission. If you need me…” 

“Go,” Hera told her. “We can manage it.” 

Ezra put his hands together in supplication and mustered the same expression. “Pleeeease?” 

“No,” Kanan told him. “You stay, or the distraction won’t work.”  

“How is that fair?” 

“Here.” Hera gave him a five credit chip and patted him on top of the head. “Go get yourself some junk food for dinner.” 

He brightened. “Thanks!” Then a piece of confetti floated down and landed on his nose. “...You just broke a cualta egg on my head, didn’t you?” They tried not to laugh at him as he strode off, calling back, “I swear, everybody picks on me!”

It started out as such a good day — the kind they only had a few times a year, everybody happy and playing and productive. Even their plan worked at first.  

Three blocks off of Main Street and half a planet away from the hidden Rebel base, Black Sun operated their clandestine auction house once a month. Anything they couldn’t fence, any product left over from a job that went south, came here to be offloaded to the highest bidder. Disruptors, shoulder-mount canons, battle droids ( usually just the small drone kind) — a plethora of goodies both nasty and illegal awaited anybody who didn’t worry about getting shivved as soon as they walked in (which was, to be fair, a distinct possibility). Today the Ghost crew’s job was to lift two items: a bulk lot of personal shield armor and a bulk lot of ion disruptors. One for the Rebellion, the other to keep it away from the Empire. 

“Why don’t we just pay for them?” Kanan had asked when they’d briefed on the mission. “The Rebellion does have SOME money, right?” 

“I don’t pay for disruptors,” Zeb had insisted, and when Ezra put in, “Yeah, but Black Sun — ” Zeb had interrupted to say again, “I don’t. Pay. For Disruptors.” 

“Oookay,” Hera had told him. “You’re staying behind on this one. And we don’t have the money to pay anyway, don’t worry.” 

“What DO we have?” Kanan had asked. 

“A plan.” 

“Good, good.” 

“My plan,” Ezra had said, grinning. 

“Oh, fantastic.” 

But these weren’t Black Sun’s finest operatives, just a warehouse run by a subsidiary branch on some backwater planet. Hera was pretty sure they could manage.

Black Market opened as the sun went down and the fireworks began. Hera and Kanan arrived a half-hour later, separately, Hera disguised as a buyer for one of the major Hutt families and Kanan representing a street gang. Then Hera threw her weight around the room for another half-hour, inspecting every piece of merchandise on the warehouse floor, demanding to see the specs, requesting demonstrations. Finally she selected the disruptors and the personal shields, waved credit chips around, and shouted to employees to BE CAREFUL with those containers. Aaaand...there. They’d moved beyond the security barriers and into the closing area. So far so good. 

Kanan came in as she was handing one of Sabine’s doctored credit chips to the Zabrak woman working the closing counter. He activated the grav units on the crates behind her and simply walked out the door with them. Hera kept the clerk talking for a good minute longer than necessary as she scanned her credit and told her, “Everything checks out. You’re good to go.”  

Then Hera turned and “discovered” that her crates were missing. “Hey!” she yelled in indignation. “That son of a monong gang-rat thief stole my product!” 

The woman raised a bored eyebrow and told her, “All purchases are final.” 

“Fine,” she snapped. “If you won’t do anything about it, I will.” She ran out the door to her speeder and raced off just as the representative inside declared, “...Wait a minute — this credit chip just went blank!” Hard luck tonight, Black Sun, she thought. 

Kanan wasn’t far ahead of her. She jammed on the fuel lever and narrowed the gap between them, leaving a nice exhaust trail for any security forces to follow. Meanwhile, a quick bait-and-switch in the alley had Ezra heading back to the Ghost with the shields, while she and Kanan sped towards the edge of town with empty packing containers. Now all she had to do was pick up whatever Black Market security followed her and then lose them. This whole job was embarrassingly easy. 

Then it got harder. 

She caught up with Kanan at the edge of town, where the two of them stopped and waited for their pursuers. Oh, there, finally. Three sets of headlights coming their way aaaaand… a blaster bolt, which hit closer than Hera was comfortable with. “Somebody’s a marksman,” she noted. 

“Yeah, I think that’s our signal to take off,” he told her. 

“Keep up, love.” 

“I always keep up!” 

They sped across the plains in the pitch black, only the glare of their headlights illuminating a few meters in front of them. Then the first of Garel’s moons rose half-full, bathing the land in eerie glow and shadows. Kanan and Hera cut the headlights, making it harder to track them. But it was a good bet that those enforcers had some kind of night vision scope, which meant their only real escape was to get out of range. 

Five blaster bolts whizzed by on all sides. Definitely night vision scopes then. And their pursuers were gaining on them.

“They’re fast,” she yelled into her comm. “You think they have 75-D speeders?” 

Two more shots missed them by a hair, then a third caught the edge of Kanan’s repulsor and he veered wildly to the side. Hera swung after him. His bike spun twice before grinding to a halt a hundred meters from where they’d started. “Yeah, probably 75-Ds” he told her.

“Hop on.” 

He let the empty crates go and jumped on the speeder behind her, and they were off again. On a slower vehicle with the three security goons only meters behind them. 

“They don’t look very happy!” Kanan told her.

“Okay,” Hera declared. “This has gone on long enough. You take the one in front.” She didn’t see what he did, but he let go of her waist with one arm and a moment later she heard the crash of a speeder far off to their side. Jedi trick then.

They’d reached the edge of the hills, great stone arches and rubble left by landslides making the trip more difficult. “Here we go,” Hera said in satisfaction. She darted through the edge of an archway and Kanan shot the outside pillar behind her. It fell with a satisfying crash. “Got them!” Kanan yelled. “Wait… No. Got one of them. Trigger finger there is still behind us. Not close enough for me to grab though.” 

“Ugh, you’d think he would take a hint!” 

Kanan’s arms around her waist tugged left, a barely perceptible gesture, and she swung to port an instant before the blaster bolt flew by on her right. A backwards tug and she pulled up, letting the next bolt pass ineffectually beneath them. She wasn’t as fast as a Jedi though, and they couldn’t keep up this kind of prescience forever. Somewhere there had to be….there! She spotted another arch, this one deceptively hidden behind a pile of rubble and sharp-edged shadow. “Want to try it again?” 

“I’m game.” 

Hera wiggled the speeder around the edge of the piled up rocks, just a bit of an angle… 

...But their pursuer had seen the arch too, and he shot out the top of it as they raced through, bringing an avalanche down on the back end of the speeder. Well, she should have seen that coming. 

“Unf,” Kanan grunted, hit by something. He held on for a second, then the momentum of their spin tossed them both wild. 

Hera didn’t feel the piece of shrapnel in her leg until she hit the ground and the impact twisted it back out again. Owwww, that had to be bad. Meters away against the base of the hill, Kanan lay unconscious. Something had probably hit him in the head before they even went down; otherwise he would have held onto her. Where was that security officer?

“Don’t move.” Oh, kriff. Standing over her with a blaster, that was where. “You thought you could pull a stupid heist like that on us?” he asked. 

Hera decided that  _ Well, yes _ was probably not the best answer to give just as he thumbed the safety off of his blaster and it hummed to life — ready and charged. 

“You killed two of my men.” 

“Wait, wait, wait!” she said, hands raised. “We can talk this over. I have information.” 

In an instant a shot sounded and the man fell, an ugly wound smoking in the middle of his chest. She looked to the hill where Kanan’s eyes gleamed, blaster in hand and obviously dialed up to high.  He hadn’t been messing around. “My hero,” she told him. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t move. “Well...mostly. You?” 

“Hold on.” She ripped the jagged edges of her flight suit open to see what the puncture on her thigh looked like. Nasty, deep, and bleeding profusely, though not gushing. The shrapnel had missed the artery. She unbuttoned her vest and pulled it off, wrapping it tightly around the wound. 

“Hera, talk to me.” 

“This job got a little more lethal than I’m comfortable with, but _ I’m  _ okay. Hold on. Seriously, Kanan, are you hurt?” She dragged herself towards him and the wrecked speeder, then rummaged through the speeder’s storage compartment while he took stock of his injuries. 

“Head,” he told her. “Though I think that’s just going to be a lump. Blood on my side and my thigh. Not that much.” 

“We’ll have a matched set of cuts,” she told him. Ah, there was the med kid. “Hold on, keep pressure.” She pulled it free and took it with her.

“Yes ma’am.”  

By the time she’d crawled over to him the blood had soaked through her vest and dripped in a disturbing trail behind her. His own hand was dark and wet despite his protestations that the wounds were “not bad.” 

“Hera, you’re bleeding.” 

“I’ll take care of the first aid. You comm the Ghost.” 

He touched his wrist communicator. She found the bacta. He touched it again as she screwed the top off of the tube, then muttered angrily in its general direction.  

“Let me guess, your comm is broken?” 

“Another casualty, I’m afraid.” 

“Well, hold still for a minute.” She pushed the edges of the gash in his thigh together and laid down a line of bacta on the wound before wrapping it in a tension bandage. He was right — the cut on his side really wasn’t bad — but she dabbed a bit of the ointment on it anyway. “Better?”

“Takes the sting out,” he admitted. “Here, trade. I’ll do you.” 

She handed him the tube and tried her own comm. “Spectre-2 to Ghost. Spectre-2 to Ghost.” Static. “Spectres-1 and -2 to Ghost. We’re in a bit of a predicament here. We could use a pick-up.” Nothing.

“Please tell me yours is working.” 

“...Maybe?” She checked the settings. “I don’t have any indication that it’s NOT. But I’m not getting any return messages, either. I think the transmitter’s fine but the receiver’s bad.” 

“So maybe they’re talking back to us right now.” 

“Maybe.” She tried again. “Spectre-2 to Ghost. I’m transmitting coordinates. We need immediate pick-up. Repeat, we have injured. We need immediate pick-up.”

“That’s going to scare them,” Kanan pointed out. 

“Good. Maybe they’ll get themselves here faster.” Hera sent the coordinates, then set her message to repeat. 

“Okay.” Kanan sat up, grunting as he did so. “First plan, pick-up. Second plan...walk home?” 

She shook her head. “That would take a solid day even if we weren’t injured. And these gashes are just going to split back open and start bleeding again if we try to walk on them.”

“Those Black Sun knock-offs probably won’t send backup right away,” Kanan mused. “That last guy didn’t comm in our location, did he?”

“No. I doubt they’ll know whether their men succeeded or failed for a while at least. And finding us in the middle of the night won’t be worth their time.” 

“In theory.” 

“In theory. But...what IS plan B, then?” 

Kanan shrugged. “Got your blaster?”

“Yes.” Hera patted her boot. 

“Eventually they send more people out to hunt for us and we get some speeders.” He winked. “Sit and wait, in any case.” 

“Mm. I can live with that.” 

Kanan held out an arm in invitation and she crawled over him to the side without armor, then settled against him with her head on his shoulder. The position made sense — Garel’s second moon had risen while they doctored themselves, and half-sitting against the hillside like this put them in the darkest part of the double shadow, able to see anyone approaching long before they were seen. And half-lying-down like this kept the gashes on their legs from pulling open. It was a good tactical decision. 

It was also very nice. 

“Am I hurting you?” she asked. 

“Huh? No. You’re not leaning on any injuries. We were lucky to make it through that crash okay.” Hera cleared her throat and could practically hear him rolling his eyes just above her head. “We were lucky to make it through that VERY EXCITING LANDING okay,” he amended. 

“Better.” That didn’t quite sit with her though. The crash had been her fault, a stupid misjudgment of their enemy, stupid arrogance about her own abilities. If she hadn’t tried the same trick twice… 

“Are you brooding?” Kanan asked. “That’s my job.” 

“No, just thinking. I’m really sorry.” 

“For…?” 

“Messing up. I messed up. I did crash. I could have done better.”

She expected him to laugh it off and cheer her up, but he didn’t. “Hey,” he said gently, “I could have caught the rocks or grabbed that guy earlier. I was off my game too. And now we have his and hers scars for our efforts, and we’ll probably be fine.” 

“Yeah,” she sighed. 

“Ezra got away with the shipment.” 

“That’s true.” 

“I’ll forgive you if I can tell everybody you crashed.” 

She turned her head and kissed his shoulder sweetly. “I’m not THAT sorry.” 

“Ah, there’s my Hera.” They sat for a minute and he plucked a stray piece of confetti from behind the cone of her ear. “This stuff really sticks.” 

“It’s nice out here, isn’t it?” She gestured at the moons. 

“Very pretty.” 

“Kanan, I can tell you’re looking at me.”

Now she could tell that he was smiling to himself. “I’m not. Look, there’s the first star. Well, the only star you can see with all this light. Make a wish.” 

Hera looked up at the star, her thoughts a jumble of barely coherent feelings rather than any one specific desire. “Okay.” 

“What did you wish for?” 

“To win the war. Restore freedom to the galaxy. Or bring freedom to it in the first place.” 

“That’s what you always say. Come on, Hera, what did you really wish for?” 

She tried to shrug, awkward in this position. “I wished to keep you all,” she admitted. “It’s unrealistic. Ezra and Sabine will grow up and do their own things — and they SHOULD. So maybe I just wished to enjoy where we are right now. I don’t know. I’m happy right now, aren’t you?” 

He considered. “Yes, I am. Kind of terrified of those Inquisitors, but, like you say, this is really nice.” 

She craned her neck to get a look at his face. “What did you wish for?” 

“Me? Oh, I gave my wish to you.” 

“Kanan!” she laughed. “I had to tell. What did you wish for?” 

He chewed on the question for a minute — not literally, though she could see the notch in his throat bob as he swallowed. When he spoke, it came out vulnerable and serious and sad. “Peace.” 

“Oh,” she said, stricken. 

He shrugged — there you have it. 

“That’s a good wish,” Hera told him. 

“One bright star, though I roam, one bright star, guide me home,” he recited the children’s rhyme. He was falling into one of those moods. It was time to distract him. 

“Okay,” she said. “If you had peace — if the war ended — what would you do with it?” 

“Whatever you told me to.” 

“Kanan Jarrus, that is not an answer! What would you really want?” 

“I don’t know,” he said, but the answer came quickly. Clearly he’d been thinking about it for a while. “To have you fly me around the galaxy without needing to go up against five TIEs at once.  A little bit of time with you that’s ours and not everybody’s.” She opened her mouth to apologize or object, but he continued, “I’m not resentful, Hera. Just looking forward to getting older and grayer and slowing down a little someday.” 

“Anything else? Something to pass the time?” 

He considered. “Lately...I think a lot about all those kids out there who could be Jedi but aren’t. The Force sensitives who don’t know what they can do but accidentally do it anyway. If there were peace...if the Jedi weren’t hunted anymore...I might want to find them. Not re-establish the Jedi Order or anything like that — I’m not qualified, and I’m not sure the galaxy needs that anyway. Just...give them a chance to learn a little about themselves so they’re not so confused. Maybe give them a path and a community so they won’t turn to pain or greed. I see Ezra, and...well...I can see him being good at that too.” He laughed a little. “That’s dreaming big though.” 

From this angle, Hera could only see his chin, the dark patch of beard, that absurdly crooked nose catching the moonlight, the little smile playing at his mouth. She loved him so much. “Kanan, you are the best man I’ve ever met.” 

He snorted skeptically. “What about you, Hera Syndulla? What will you do when the galaxy’s at peace?” 

She laughed. “The galaxy will never be at peace. Even if we defeat the Empire — and I don’t see that happening in our lifetimes — there will still be the slaver rings and the Hutts and all sorts of things.” 

“So you’re going to keep going until you fix it all.” He gave her a level look. 

“No, but it’s nice to try.” 

“And you don’t want anything for yourself?” 

She shrugged. “I want to be useful. I want to fly.” 

“Hera…” 

“I don’t know, Kanan. I guess I’ve never really thought beyond the war. The last time I wasn’t in a war I was six, so it’s hard to imagine what that would be like.” 

“Nothing?”

“I’d...need...a purpose. I really don’t know. Let me think about it for a while.” 

“All right.” 

They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the moons. The breeze blew cool against Hera’s face, but Kanan kept her side warm. After a bit he shifted her upwards and rolled his arm around so it wouldn’t lose feeling. When she settled back against him, he said, “I owe you a conversation.” 

“Oh yeah?” 

“About a certain egg.” 

“Hmm? Kanan I wasn’t really mad about that. I was just giving you a hard time.” 

“Yeah, that’s not the conversation I meant.” 

“What then? You mean — Oh, the baby conversation?!”  _ Are you crazy? _ she refrained from asking. “I thought we’d had that one already.” 

He shrugged. “Circumstances change. Always a good idea to touch base.” 

She swallowed a stab of regret. They’d been having such a nice evening. “We’re still in the middle of a war.” 

“So you’re saying, even if we were at peace — ” 

“We’re not at peace though, Kanan.” 

“I know that,” he said patiently, “and this is a hypothetical exercise. You’re saying even if we were at peace, you would not want children.” 

“We have children.” 

“Of course we do, and frankly I love them far more than they deserve most of the time. But I meant additional ones, of the smaller variety, that we grow inside of you.” 

“That’s not even possible.” 

“So you wouldn’t want to adopt smaller ones later. If it were safe.” His tone was so neutral.

“I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. I’m not opposed to the idea on principal. I just...can’t imagine it being safe. No babies during wartime. That’s the rule.” 

“Okay then.” He held his free hand up — don’t shoot. “Like I said, I gave my wish to you.” 

“I mean it, Kanan, it’s too dangerous. They can’t get out of the way or tell you what’s wrong. You could smother them just trying to keep them quiet. If their caretakers die, they’re helpless.”

“Hera — ” Kanan said.

She was vaguely aware of going on too long but couldn’t stop herself. “And even if they don’t die in some explosion or flyby, the hardship is… They have little lungs and little bodies.”

“Hera.”

“Any deprivation or sickness, and that’s it.” 

“Hera, who died?” 

“What? Nobody. Today was a really good day. I had a lot of fun.” She took a breath, suddenly aware that she needed it. 

“Little lungs. Little bodies. Hey, breathe, okay?” 

She took another breath and it came out ragged. 

“Every time I think I know everything about you…” Kanan shrugged helplessly, “...I don’t,” he finished. “Who was it?” 

“Oh.” She sighed. It’s nothing, it was a long time ago, she meant to convey. “My brother.” 

He paused for a surprised moment, stricken on her behalf, then let out a slow, pained breath. “How old was he?” 

“About one, I think?” 

“How old were you?” 

“Seven. I watched — ” She swallowed. “He got very tired. And then he started coughing. We were trapped in Cazne, in the canyons, and I watched my mother…” She stopped and tried to think about how to phrase it. “Kanan, she looked at me. And she looked at him. And then she decided who got the food. I saw it on her face, and I never, ever want to be in that position.” 

He let out a long breath, then said, “You know, if you tell me about these things I won’t push on sensitive issues.” 

“It’s okay,” she said, letting the memory go. “It’s not that sensitive.” And it was true — thinking of that time now made her tired and wary, but not sad. “Anyway, he was my baby for nearly a year, and I’m lucky to have had that.” 

“Hera, I’m never going to put you in that position. As long as I’m around, you’re never going to have to make that choice.” 

Oh? She thought. Remember a few months ago when I had to choose between rescuing you and keeping Ezra safe? But Kanan took other people’s tragedies too much to heart, and she’d worried him with her story, so out loud she only said, “Okay.” 

“Okay?” he double-checked. 

“Yeah.” She smiled so he would believe her. “Sorry for dropping that on your lap when we were having a nice, relaxing evening.” 

He snorted. “Relaxing, huh?”

“Well, not earlier. But this part is.” 

“I’m glad you told me.” 

“As long as we’re having this conversation, Kanan, we might as well finish it. Why DO you want small, helpless children?” 

He grinned at her choice of words. “I don’t even KNOW if I want them. I just like the possibility.”

“Why?”

He thought about that for a long minute. “Because babies feel like...peace.”

“You’ve never met any actual babies, then?”

“No, really, Hera. They’re something you do during peacetime, to show that you believe in the yourself and your people. That you believe things will get better. Peace will last.”

“It’s a person, not a symbol,” she said. She said it gently though. 

“That’s a fair point, and I am, in fact, scared to death of real babies.” 

Hera laughed out loud. “Really?” 

“What if I hold them wrong and their heads snap off, or I don’t feed them right, or they...leak? I’d rather face the Inquisitors.”

“You’ve got some conflicting views, Kanan Jarrus.”

“I’m a complicated guy.” He winked. 

“See, you joke, but you really are.” 

He met her eyes with a look of dopey fondness, then said, “Okay, let’s talk about something less heavy. Tell me about that novel you were reading the other day.” 

“I’m not done with it, but you’ll like it if their ideas about magic don’t drive you crazy. I think the Night Sisters are going to be...the good guys?” 

“I was promised zombies. That’s what you told me when I said I’d read it.” 

“Oh, there are zombies.” 

When the Ghost showed up a half-hour later, everybody panicking because  _ why won’t Kanan and Hera respond?! _ , the conversation had moved on from books to “what did you do as a kid to celebrate Harvest Day?” to “what’s the worst prank you ever played?” and Hera was giggling herself helpless over Kanan’s description of combat karaoke, which he swore was a real thing in some Mandalorian colonies.  Ezra poked his head out of the bay doors, heard her laughing, and went into full nagging parent mode: “You worried us sick!” 

A nice night. 

Even if they had covered the interior of her ship in confetti.

 

…

 

Hera visited Garel during the Festival of Color again, but not for nine years. When she returned, she did so as an Emissary of the New Republic and an honored guest for the first anniversary of the Empire’s defeat at Endor. Those who had fought at the battle were sought-after commodities for this occasion, and the Gareli Parliament privately wondered how they’d been so lucky as to get General Hera Syndulla. She hadn’t forgotten how they’d sheltered the Rebels though, or how many strikes the planet had taken in that disastrous escape from the Imperial fleet.  

Chopper stayed on the Ghost, uncomfortable with the idleness and joy of organics’ festivities. Hera wandered the street market with Jacen who, after giving up on whining for a replica Trandoshan sword, settled on the much more reasonable request of cualta eggs. She promptly bought a dozen. 

“Can I have one of those dolls too?” he asked, pointing to a 60-credit handcrafted rancor puppet. 

“No, but we can look at them.”

“Do I have to listen to you make a boring speech?”

“Kid, not only do you have to listen, you have to stand up there with me and act like a decent, respectable child, because I don’t have anyone else to watch you today.” 

He groaned and rolled his eyes. She didn’t think five-year-olds were supposed to grasp the kind of subtle annoyance behind eye-rolling. “Suck it up, sunblossom,” she told him. “Be good and I’ve got a treat for you.” 

“Candy? Namana twists?” he asked hopefully. 

“Better. Because your famous mother loves you, she might have used some of her pull to get us a position firing the paint canons.” 

His jaw dropped. 

“...Is that a good thing?” she asked. 

“YEAH!” 

“I will be helping you. And the ‘not in the face’ rule goes triple for today.” 

“Okay, okay. But CAN we get Namana twists?” 

“Let’s find some real eggs to eat or something like that first.” 

“Uhm, my stomach doesn’t feel all that great. It doesn’t really feel like eggs. Just Namana twists.” 

“Nice try, kid.” 

He shrugged, willing to eat whatever meant that he could fill his stomach up with sugar later. “Fine. Can I play the games at those booths?” 

“Sure.”

“Can I hold the glitter eggs?” 

Hera gave him a long look, but handed them over. Then she took his hand and they wandered towards the games.

“I came here once with your father,” she told him. 

“Did you get him with an egg?” Jacen asked.

“No.” 

He looked disappointed. “Well...did he get you?” 

Hera laughed. “Yeah.”

How many times had she thought back to the conversation they’d had that night? Too many, especially right before Jacen had come. How selfish she’d been during those years, everything her plan, her idea. Everything went the way she wanted it to because Kanan always gave in to her. She’d been so certain, in her dedication to the cause, that what she was doing was right. So certain that because it was good, she had the right to push Kanan into it. 

“I gave my wish to you,” Kanan had said, all those years ago. She’d remembered his words for so long, a haunting, unsettling echo. 

Now though, Jacen was pilfering two cualta eggs from the crate they’d bought, his back turned with what he imagined to be great stealth.

“Hey, Mom?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Bend down. I need to whisper something in your ear.” 

She sighed a long-suffering sigh and dutifully bent down.  _ Crack _ went the cualta egg on top of her head.

“I got you!” Jacen laughed. “Haha, I got you!” 

“Oh yeah?” Hera raised an eyebrow at him and he backed up, laughing harder. “Oh YEAH?” She picked him up in both arms, leaned over him, and shook her head, raining glitter and confetti and colored eggshell onto him. “I guess you should have thought about the counter-attack when you made your plans, huh?” 

“Mom!” he protested, “No counter-attacks! Peacetime! Peacetime!”

_ Hera, _ Kanan said a lifetime ago, _ I gave my wish to you.  _

She ticked Jacen’s side. He giggled helplessly, a happy little thing in her arms. 


End file.
